


Leuconoe

by Quillori



Category: Inspired by Music - Fandom, On the Weight of Night - Balmorhea (Instrumental)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 20:00:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7004383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sailor reflects on the sea, and the stars, and where you may sail by them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leuconoe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lexigent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexigent/gifts).



> The track this is based on is [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq69lHNgePw). Since it's entirely instrumental, you can play it in the background while reading this. (It is, in fact, possible to read the first two paragraphs in time to the music, but luckily I remembered in time the many good reasons I don't to podfic and refrained from recording it. I might post an addendum showing the text broken down into bars if I can find where I put it.)

Stars, they say – slap of the waves on the bow, and the creak of the rigging, the ropes pulling taut – stars, they say, drift on the tide of some distant ocean, and the ocean above and the ocean below are indigo dark and deep without end. They say this in desert ports, burned by the sun and cold at night (it was cotton we were shipping, cotton and ivory, and at least the rats didn't trouble the ivory), and I've seen – not there, nowhere near the desert, but in other waters, by the white beaches of Greece, and offshore of the Isles of Plenty – I've seen the little lights aplay at night, glowing in the wake like the Milky Way above. The sky another sea, and what boats sail upon it? 

The sea, they say, is ever-changing, grey and green and blue, peaceful and whipped with storms, limpid-clear and clogged with kelp and silt. But the sea is always dark: however blue it seems, however clear, go down deep enough, and you will find the darkness, and the warm sunlight high above you, vanished, out of reach. There are divers who go deep, looking for pearls, who swim so long and so far you would think the water their home: I remember, once, when I was young, I tried to follow them down – they say that sailors do not learn to swim, that we are superstitious and think the hour of our death comes inescapable, that we should meet it without struggling, but when they say that, they do not think of the heat of the sun, the cool embrace of the sea, the shock of it, when your body cleaves the water, and the moment that follows, when you fly in truth, turning and veering like a bird, like a fish; they do not think of the salt drying on your skin, your feet sinking into the hot sand, the taste of ripe fruit; they do not see the glare of the midday sun, reflected in the water, nor how fast it sinks, goes golden, turns to fire and is swallowed by the night (so fast, too fast: the warm and perfumed night treads eagerly upon the setting sun, and the dark night follows fastest the brightest day. But then, when you are young, the night is as sweet as the day, and cannot come too soon.)

The waves are constant, and one could sail forever, a wanderer, out of time, the dark sea and the sky above. So ships sailed in the olden times – casting off their lines (tough and salt drenched lines, burning the hands, heavy with water), leaving some real, terrestrial port, heavy laden (boxes of tea and bales of silk, barrels of saltpetre, cones of sugar), a woman on the quayside calling goodbye, her voice one with the screech of the gulls overhead (real gulls, blood and feathers and shit, reeking of fish), and the lithe, tanned pilot leaping lightly to the little boat lying in wait, rocking gently, just past the harbour mouth. So they sailed, on and away into legend, never returning, afloat somewhere in the darkness, ghost ships, ships of the moon (and the moon, they say, is a ship herself, eight sailors only to man her, seven men and a woman (or six and two, it was never clear). And who has plumbed the depths of the sea? Perhaps a ship that sinks, sinks forever, sailing silent down and down into an endless dark. But who can say? Perhaps two darknesses may meet, as ocean currents meet, and merge, and the depths of the sea and the depths of the sky are the same, a busy shipping lane that runs the Mariana Trench to the Milky Way.

They say that the gulls are souls of sailors, grieving their ships, still in love with the sea (or searching forever for their former bodies, never buried: they say this most in lands where the churches preach land-burial, preach that men without graves, without death rites, are barred forever from paradise, condemned to wander the sea without hope. In other places, they say the sea is best, send chieftains and great warriors out in burning boats, flames merging with the setting sun). They say that gulls are sailors' souls, and the sleek and friendly dolphins too, that come, and keep company, and disappear again into the depths (their sleek forms sheathed in phosphorescent fire, out past the Maldives, when you sail for the Southern Land as through a sea of stars).

They say, and they say, and they say, but I have almost drowned in truth, mouth filled with salt, desperate to breathe, struggling and fighting as my limbs cramped, refused to hold me up above the waves, eyes burning, lungs bursting, alone and seized by terror, and drowning is no easy death to go with dreams up into the sky, to slip into the depths of sleep as smoothly as a ship down the ramp into the sea at its christening, taking to the waves for the first time, the sea calm and welcoming, all the signs propitious. 

I have seen, too, after a storm – the ship tossed and shaken, waves washing across the deck, beams broken, the flickers of dancing flame about the mast (St Elmo's fire, they call it) – I have seen what's left of some other, some unlucky ship – cracked spars, splintered apart, a crate of oranges bobbing in the new-calmed sea, so little wreckage for so much lost (a woman, somewhere, waiting at the docks, children, a merchant cursing the cost of the cargo, the cost of the ship; friends, too, but a sailor's friends know not to keep a seat empty, not to expect reunions: he will come if the stars will it, if the wind allows, and otherwise a wise man raises no toast to absent friends, speaks no word of those that are gone into the distance, out beyond the line of the horizon. He does not ask if they sail above or below the breaking waves, or if they still hear the slap of water on the bows, feel the cool of the ocean breeze). I have seen the sailors of those sunken ships, those ships bound only for the darkness, bearing their cargoes (copper and gold and china vases) away beyond the reach of men: what is left of them, the sailors, bloated, nibbled away by fish, and the gulls, the gulls that screech and turn, diving down from the sky to the sea – they are what the Greeks called harpies, and it is not with fish alone they feed their hunger.

But I have seen, too, other things, a thousand times better: the moon on the water, a pathway of silver – there's a word for it, I forgot quite how it's said, in the tongue of the cold Northern Lands – and the palaces, white and blue, like a fairytale, all carved from ice, that drift from those same lands to melt at last in the warm sea-tide. These days, you speak of mermaids and everyone thinks of warm Southern seas, of the sirens that sang in the days of the Greeks, of modern nymphs (the half-naked fisherwomen on a beach in the Indies, or the girls that swam out to the ship when we passed, bringing pearls and coral for sale: pearls, and coral, and half of them glass, for fairy gold's the same, wherever you're fool enough to find it). 

Well, the land teams with life, down there in the tropics, warm bays full of palms, and fruit that falls into your hand – but up there in the north, desolate, cold, where green fire dances in the sky, and the sun hides away for months at a time – to my way of thinking, there must be something that carves up the ice, for I've seen those icebergs overturn, and the underside is finer and grander than any gothic church. And up there, where day and night divorced, and go their separate ways, why shouldn't the life be below the freezing waves? Above, nothing. The constant cracking and crickling of ice, the silent white monsters that appear from nowhere, big enough to devour a man whole: how is that different from the gentler, warmer seas to the south? The chitter and chirrup of fish amongst the coral, the huge grey monsters that rise up from the depths … what the sea is like down south is the land in the north, so who is to say what it's like from the other side? Perhaps the icebergs float like islands, a mirror world where selkies have their Borneo, their Vanuatan shore. 

Now shore-leave, that's a thing you can't know confined to land: a man who goes down the pub every afternoon, or whenever the fancy takes him, or one who strolls out of an evening, the same time every night, to walk with his friends round the piazza and take a drink – custom wears away the pleasure, makes it pleasant and familiar, but no well-spring of joy, no sudden camaraderie, no cherished memory. That old wooden bench, for example, splinters worn smooth by time and the sea air, and the lingering smell of the fish market: I can almost taste the drink (was it arak or raki or ouzo?), the salted cheese, the soft little tentacled things drenched in lemon, the olives … a hand on my shoulder, a smile … is the harbour pilot a sailor or a man of the land? No matter – someone was singing, voice rough but good, and we sat shoulder to shoulder, thinking we had the best life had to offer. 

Or, elsewhere, we sat outside, beneath the palm trees, fish cooking in the ashes of a fire, sometimes a chicken too, if we were lucky (old and tough, but the taste was good), smell of smoke and flowers, and the sky above seeded with as many stars as the white sand-grains beneath our feet. There was singing then too, softer and sweeter than in other lands, one song passed on from singer to singer around the fire. (It was palm-sap wine, there, as I recall, which was never my favourite, but even in paradise you can't have everything your way.)

And of course I know I'm remembering it wrong, or not wrong exactly, but only the best of it – but then, the best was pretty good, and worth remembering. Let the rest fall away. The waves on the bow, and the creak of the rigging, and the stars above reflected in the wake below: it is enough and enough for me, whatever is to come.


End file.
